Monthly Archives: October 2012

To say October has been a busy month here at Placed would be an understatement. Earlier this month we launched Placed Panels, providing businesses with the ability to build their own location panel to drive actionable insights into the offline behaviors of their customers. This quantification of the physical world enables businesses to leverage location as a competitive advantage.

On the heels of this announcement, Placed was selected as the winner at two prestigious startup competitions held at theiMedia Breakthrough Summitand the O’Reilly Strata Conference. These showcases included some of today’s most-innovative startups in the mobile and big data space, and saw many of the industry’s senior leaders in the audience as they contributed their votes to the competitions.

These two awards highlight the foundation of Placed; our actionable analytics and technical prowess. Winning the Mobile Campaign Management and Analysis Category at iMedia demonstrates the value that location data can bring to brands across industries – whether you are a retailer, CPG company, or publisher. Understanding the real-world visitation patterns of your customer segments provides needed insights to make offline and online strategies more effective and efficient.

The audience at the Strata Conference was significantly different from iMedia, Data Scientists versus Brand Marketers, but the result was very similar with Placed being selected as one of the winners of the Startup Showcase. Specifically, we were chosen as a winner by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. Fred described Placed as “doing something very unique and different” from the other big data startups, where the focus wasn’t on systems, but rather insights and actionability using big data.

When we started Placed, the location analytics discussion was in its infancy both from a technical and a market strategy perspective. Now, location is becoming an increasingly important part of the conversation as companies aim to understand their consumer at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds. These recent wins at the iMedia and Strata conferences further demonstrate that location analytics resonates across multiple disciplines, and that Placed is the recognized leader in the emerging world of location analytics.

Today, we are excited to launch Placed Panels, our next step in bringing location analytics to companies looking for real-world insights.

Where Do Your Customers Go Throughout Their Day?

Placed Panels is a platform for businesses to build location panels and understand the places that their customer segments go in the physical world.

Unlike Placed Analytics, Placed Panels provides a view into location activities throughout the day for opt-in participants. We received feedback that while it was useful to know where their users were when interacting with their mobile content, businesses also wanted more insights into where their customers were going throughout the day. Now, you can get a bigger picture of your customers’ preferences; for example, you can determine which competitors’ stores they visit in the physical world, and how often.

Start Recruiting Panelists in Just 15 Minutes

Placed Panels gives you the tools to start recruiting panelists and obtaining location insights in just 15 minutes. We provide a recruitment URL, a co-branded mobile app and access to the analytics reports. You simply need to determine which customer segments you want to measure, how many panelists you want to recruit, the duration of the panel and the incentive (optional).

Features Available with Placed Panels

We are also adding some new features to our analytics reports, available just with Placed Panels:

Demographic filters – For example, which restaurants do women visit most often? Which restaurants do men visit? Do people with household income over $100k prefer different retail stores to people with household income of $50-75k?

Ratings-level reporting on visitors – Obtain figures around the number of visits and visitors to a place during a given time period, at a higher level of precision than the nearby data offered in Placed Analytics

View Example Insights

Here are some examples of data available through Placed Panels, based on a pilot run in August 2012. This panel sought to identify differences in behavior across ten markets.

McDonald’s and Walmart were the only two businesses to be ranked in top 10 in all reported markets

Target made the top ten in six markets, but never ranked above seven. Walmart averaged a rank of 2.5 across all markets.

Behind McDonald’s, only five other quick serve restaurants appeared in the top 10 in more than one market: Subway (7), Jack In The Box (3), Whataburger (2), Sonic (2), Wendy’s (2).

Starbucks (9) appeared in the top ten twice as often as Dunkin’ Donuts (4). In the markets where both businesses were active, Dunkin’ Donuts outranked Starbucks 75% of the time.

Walgreens (5) had more appearances in the top 10 than CVS (4), but CVS ranked higher 100% of the time when both companies were in the same market

How Much Will it Cost You? Nothing.

In our quest to make location analytics accessible to everyone, we are offering Placed Panels as a free service. While we plan to charge for premium features in the future, the base level of services will be offered for free. The only cost you will incur is the cost of incentivizing panelists (recommended, but not required).